British Library Journal (volume 21, number 1, spring 1995)

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A 'catalogue of Hebrew printers'
(1995-05)
Hill, Brad Sabin
FOR most of this century, an unbound manuscript of nearly a thousand leaves lay in the offices of the Hebrew Section of the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books of the British Museum (later the Oriental Collections of the British Library). Despite its bulk, the manuscript remained unaccessioned, apparently unrecognized or unnoticed by curatorial staff, and unknown to researchers in the Hebrew collections of the British Museum Library. Mercifully, the manuscript was not lost or discarded overtime, as was the fate of similar material in the past, although it was certainly forgotten. At the time of the move of the Oriental Collections from Store Street in Bloomsbury to Orbit House near Blackfriars, in 1991, its yellowed leaves were boxed and labelled, and for the first time brought to the attention of scholars.
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Charles II's Hebrew books
(1995-05)
Goldstein, David
THE collection of Hebrew books in the British Library (formerly the Library of the British Museum) is acknowledged to be one of the greatest in the world, and I do not have to expand on its importance, or on the wealth and variety of its manuscripts and printed books. I should like here to examine a small, but vital, part of the collection. I refer to the 180 Hebrew books that once belonged to Charles II, and that were given to the Museum by Solomon da Costa Athias in 1759. I intend to make my way back through a century of history from 1759 to 1659, to analyse the collection and to pursue its fortunes, and even to try to ascertain its origins before it reached the library of Charles II - although this, I am afraid, will be tentative and hypothetical.
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C. D. Ginsburg and the Shapira Affair: a nineteenth-century Dead Sea Scroll controversy
(1995-05)
Reiner, Fred N.
IN July 1883, Moses Wilhelm Shapira, a well-known Jerusalem dealer in antiquities and ancient manuscripts, offered to sell a scroll of Deuteronomy to the British Museum, one of his regular customers. Thus began one of the most celebrated incidents in the history of biblical scholarship, a saga that continues more than a century later. The Deuteronomy scroll offered by Shapira was written in the same ancient Canaanite Hebrew script (also called Palaeo-Hebrew or Phoenician) that appears on the Mesha or Moabite Stone. This particular palaeography, coupled with significant differences between this text and the standard biblical text, made the fifteen fragments of this scroll extremely interesting to Victorian Bible scholars. The possibility that an original or (at least) very ancient manuscript of Deuteronomy had been discovered generated great public interest.
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Further notes on Samaritan typography
(1995-05)
Crown, Alan D.
IN my recent study of Samaritan typefaces I was able to trace the history and development of some of the more important of these on the basis of the evidence then available to me. That study stimulated some interest among both historians of typography and librarians. Through the kindness of Brad Sabin Hill of the British Library, who has drawn my attention to specimens which I would not otherwise have seen, including examples from both the British Library and the Tychsen collection in the University Library at Rostock, and of Nigel Roach of the St Bride Printing Library, London, I have been able to refine some of the ideas about the history of the Samaritan typefaces which were developed in the original work and make corrections to opinions then offered. I have also been made aware that one of the allegedly lost English faces, the first English Samaritan types to be cut, found its way to Sheffield where it now remains. Additionally, it is now possible to draw attention to a number of other Samaritan typefaces of which I was not previously aware.
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The India Office manuscript of Maimonides's Guide: the earliest complete copy in the Judaeo-Arabic original
(1995-05)
Langermann, V. Tzvi
AMONG the rich holdings of the India Office Library there exists but a single manuscript in Hebrew characters, I.O.M. MS. 3679. However, this manuscript, a beautifully executed copy of Moses Maimonides's Dalalat al-Ha'irin (Guide of the Perplexed), is both aesthetically remarkable and of no little scholarly interest. It is the earliest complete copy of Maimonides's Guide in the Judaeo-Arabic original. In the following paragraphs we shall describe the manuscript in some detail and offer as well some observations on its place within Maimonidean scholarship.
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The story of my library
(1995-05)
Gaster, Moses
The distinguished Romanian Jewish linguist, literary historian and folklorist Moses Gaster (Bucharest, 1856-London, 1939) assembled an enormous library in his fields of interest and specialization: Hebraica and Judaica, Samaritana, and Romanian and related studies. Gaster's library was divided between a number of institutions over the course of nearly forty years, both during his lifetime and in the generation after his death.
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Yiddish manuscripts in the British Library
(1995-05)
Prager, Leonard
;
Hill, Brad Sabin
FEW Yiddish manuscripts predating the age of printing have survived the storms of Jewish and general history. The oldest extant dated Yiddish document is a rhymed inscription of a dozen words in the Worms Mahzor ('festival liturgy') of 1272, now in the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem. By far the most important Yiddish manuscript is the dated 1382 Cambridge Codex from the famous Cairo Genizah in Fostat, Egypt. The Cambridge Codex has been the centre of a heated linguistic debate, Yiddishists maintaining that the language is Old Yiddish and many Germanists claiming it is High German in Hebrew letters. The historiography of this more than merely terminological question is itself a gripping chapter of cultural history, and one linguist has mounted what at present seems to be an unassailable defence of the Yiddishist position. This question of language is fundamental to bibliographical as well as linguistic investigation, and librarians have often been puzzled as to how to classify Yiddish materials. Today, librarians no longer describe Yiddish books as 'Judaeo-German', as was common practice in the British Museum Library and elsewhere until about fifty years ago. Yiddish, quite rightly, is classified linguistically among the Germanic languages; but owing to the script in which Yiddish has almost always been written - the Hebrew alphabet - Yiddish books and manuscripts are often found in Hebrew or Oriental collections.
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A supplementary list of Judaeo-Persian manuscripts
(1995-05)
Moreen, Vera Basch
THE field of Judaeo-Persian studies is still underdeveloped, as most Judaeo-Persian texts continue to lie buried in uncatalogued collections of manuscripts scattered throughout the world. Although their importance was already recognized at the end of the nineteenth century, and despite the fact that they constitute one of the largest untapped groups of Jewish vernacular texts in Hebrew characters, Judaeo-Persian texts continue to be little known and studied. Significant numbers of Judaeo-Persian manuscripts can be found in major European libraries, such as the British Library (formerly the British Museum Library), the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and the library of the Institute of Oriental Studies and the Russian National Library (formerly the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library), both at St Petersburg. The largest collections are those of the Jewish National and University Library and the library of the Ben Zvi Institute, both in Jerusalem, the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York, and the Klau Library of Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati. It is also known that many Judaeo-Persian manuscripts are still privately owned in and outside Iran; some of these continue to trickle into the libraries just mentioned.
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A Hebrew manuscript of Clavicula Salomonis, Part II
(1995-05)
Rohrbacher-Sticker, Claudia
NOWADAYS it is almost a truism to say that there are more and deeper marks of mutual influences between many Christian and Jewish religious traditions of the medieval and early modern period than have long been acknowledged. This is especially true where magic is involved, a branch of knowledge whose adherents seemingly tended to be less concerned than others about questions of religious propriety, and who often displayed a marked interest in foreign beliefs and practices. And yet it is surprising to encounter the manifold traces of inter-religious and cross-cultural contacts and to find even specifically Christian formulae and practices in a Hebrew manuscript which represents an important string of Jewish magical traditions.
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British Library Journal (volume 21, number 1, spring 1995)

British Library Journal (volume 21, number 1, spring 1995)

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